1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an endoscopic diagnosis support method, an endoscopic diagnosis support apparatus, and an endoscopic diagnosis support program, all of which are for supporting an endoscopic diagnosis carried out based on an endoscopic image picked up by an endoscopic observation apparatus for picking up images of an observation region by autonomously moving within a lumen, and in particular to the endoscopic diagnosis support method, endoscopic diagnosis support apparatus and endoscopic diagnosis support program for supporting an endoscopic diagnosis by identifying a bleeding region based on an endoscopic image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Endoscopes have conventionally been widely used in medical practice and industrial fields. Among the recent medical practice-use endoscopes exists a so called capsule endoscope which no longer requires an insertion part by forming the scope as a capsule configuration. The capsule endoscope is configured to comprise an image pickup function and a radio communication function, and is swallowed by a patient to be observed (i.e., examined), followed by picking up images of respective organs such as stomach and intestine in an orderly fashion and likewise transmitting the pickup image information (i.e., electronic data representing an image) externally through radio waves during an observation period until it is naturally ejected from the human body.
Thusly wirelessly transmitted image information is received by a receiver equipped externally to the body of the patient and stored in predetermined memory, followed by a physician utilizing for diagnosis, et cetera, by reading the information and displaying in such as a display apparatus on an as required basis according to the configuration.
Such a capsule endoscope, however, has an observation period extending eight hours or more than ten hours since the observation period spans from a patient swallowing it to a natural ejection thereof, resulting in the number of pieces of image information obtained by picking up images during such a long hours becoming enormous.
Due to this, a grasp of such an enormous number of pieces of image information in a short time available in a stage such as diagnosis is never easy, nor is it easy to find a desired piece of image information, such as image information related to an image photographing an disorder region, et cetera, from the enormous number thereof.
Meanwhile, not just pertaining to a diagnosis using a capsule endoscope, but a diagnosis in an endoscopic examination including a common endoscope depends largely on a subject of a physician, and thus desired is an implementation of a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) detecting an existence of a diseased focus for the purpose of improving a quality of an image diagnosis and shortening a radiogram interpretation time. Such an endoscopic diagnosis support apparatus utilizing the CAD is for presenting, to a physician, as to what finding or lesion an image as a diagnosis target is categorized by using various characteristic quantities calculated from a region of interest (ROI) within an image and using a threshold value process or a statistical/non-statistical identifier, thereby supporting an objective and quantitative diagnosis; and by selecting an image suspicious of a disease, thereby alleviating a load on the physician interpreting a radiogram.
In a diagnosis using such an endoscopic image, various pathological rationales can be considered on an existence of a bleeding, and a number of approaches have accordingly been employed for detecting a bleeding.
As one of them, disclosed is a method of presetting sample values of hue, saturation and brightness of a bleeding region, and those of hue, saturation and brightness of a normal mucous membrane for the same image as the bleeding region, and judging a closeness of the value of the target region to either region, thereby discerning whether it is the normal mucous membrane or a bleeding region (refer to a patent document 1 for example).    Patent document 1: International disclosure No. 02/073507 brochure